The Twilight movies were clearly a huge blessing for Robert Pattinson, but also somewhat of a curse: The 28-year-old Brit has been working overtime to break out of the pin-up mold, gravitating toward edgy indies like David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and this week’s The Rover, directed by Animal Kingdom filmmaker David Michôd. The sometimes brutally violent film features Pattinson as a left-for-dead “half-wit” who joins a vengeful Guy Pearce’s as they travel across a rural, post-apocalyptic Australia. The very candid Pattinson talked to us about getting down-and-dirty for the role, his strategy for keeping photographers away, and what artist has reignited his love for hip-hop.
Let’s talk about your look in this film. People have said you “uglified” yourself for the role.The one weird thing [I had] was the teeth. I thought everyone was going to have s—-ty teeth in it. Then I end up being the only person in it with s—-ty teeth in it [laughs]. But I kind of liked the idea of it, because I went to school with people who didn’t brush their teeth when they were kids, and they always ended up being weirdos.
What did you do to get those nasty teeth?It’s like paint, and whenever there was a long scene, it would wipe off my teeth. So I would end up with white teeth at the end of the scene, which eventually became a massive hassle. But it was still kind of cool. It was such an odd look when you turn around and see yourself [in the mirror] and there’s this weird thing coming out of your face.
Did you go out in public much to get reactions, or even just to get in character?Yeah, [but] there was nowhere to go, really. It’s funny: Whenever you have your head shaved, less people come up to you and ask for pictures [laughs]. That’s why I always try to keep my hair really short.
They’re like, “No, no, I don’t want that Robert Pattinson.”Exactly. “I want the sexy one!”
You very memorable sing along to the Keri Hilson song "Pretty Girls Rock" in this film. Did you have any hand in picking that track?I do kind of really like that song. I didn’t realize how massive a song it was. I had never heard it before. David emailed it to me and I was like, “Wow, where did you find this?” I thought it was an original track, or a really small thing that he’d found somewhere. But I thought it was kind of perfect for it. As soon as he played it, I was like, “That’s hilarious.”
What’s your relationship with pop music? Are you a fan?I guess I don’t listen to that much pop music. I listen to almost exclusively hip-hop, especially in L.A. I listen to Shade 45 on Sirius.
What are your jams?I’m kind of obsessed with Tyga at the moment. I don’t know why, I’ve suddenly had this resurgence of hip-hop. I didn’t listen to it for years, and now I’m obsessed. When I was in school, from like 1997 to 2003, I was really, really into hip-hop. All of my favorite songs are from then. But there’s a couple of new people; I actually really like Chris Brown’s stuff [laughs].
Amy Nicholson, the critic from LA Weekly, wrote of The Rover, “Pattinson appears to have picked this role precisely because it will send his Twilight fans screaming out of the theater.” Any truth to that?No, I don’t want anyone running out of the theater! I want everyone coming into the theater [laughs]. It’s kind of curious how people interpret it. There’s an element of wanting to see [my Rover character] in a sympathetic way, because of Twilight. But I wasn’t trying to play it sympathetically at all. [laughs] I mean, he kills people. And he’s not quite there.
So clearly critics as well as your fans are making this connection from “A” to “B” but that’s not something you ever think about?Yeah. I mean a lot of people take away completely different things. I never really try to predict how people are going to react to something. Because I have no idea. I’ve approached every movie thinking like, “I’m going to do the best thing ever.” [laughs] And then regardless of what critics or an audience or anybody says afterwards, I either like it or I don’t —that’s the only thing I care about.
Is there any part of you that misses the sheer madness that accompanied the Twilight series?Um….when you’re doing the movies, it’s the same thing. I’ve realized how much I loved shooting way outside of the city, because I just can’t stand people taking photos. Even when I was just doing this movie Life in Toronto, we were still out in the middle of nowhere, but it was only about an hour from Toronto. And just everyday, there’s [paparazzi] taking photos with long lenses. And then you can’t talk to anybody on the crew unless you want to have a million photographs. And I feel like I’m putting money into those guys’ pockets by just standing outside. So I’ll constantly hide to make their life as difficult as possible. But then it makes your life difficult as well.
Has it become kind of a game ducking them, or is it just pure annoyance?It’s literally just [that] I don’t want them to have anything for free. And people who see the pictures, they just assume if you’re getting photographed a lot, it’s because you want to. So if you try to claim privacy afterwards, they’ll be like, “Well what you didn’t care that time.” So you have to be pretty consistent, and say like, “I never want to get photographed, ever.”
Do you ever have to go out in disguise?It never really works. But I do have a lot of little tricks, like car switches and stuff. You end up being like a bit of a spy. [laughs] Very covert.
BuzzFeed
In The Rover’s bleak universe, there is virtually no backstory — illustrative of a world in which nothing really matters — and we know little about Robert Pattinson’s Rey other than that he and his older brother (Scoot McNairy) are in a small band of thugs who were violently thwarted during a criminal act we don’t see. An injured Rey has been abandoned for expedience’s sake, which is how he becomes a hostage to Eric (Guy Pearce), whose car has been stolen by Rey’s former friends. (Eric really wants that car back, for a reason that is revealed only in the movie’s final moments.) As Rey, Pattinson plays a “half-wit,” as Eric calls him, a far cry from Twilight’s Edward Cullen, the emo vampire who served as a tweenage fantasy.
The Rover is David Michôd’s second feature as a director, following up on 2010’s lauded, provocative Animal Kingdom. And though it takes place in Australia, where Michôd is from, Rey and his brother inexplicably have American Southern accents. It’s good for Pattinson to sound nothing like Edward, the character that made him famous. Rey starts out fearful — in one scene he folds himself into a fetal position. But he also changes as the movie goes on (to describe would be to spoil). In Variety, Scott Foundas called it a “career-redefining performance” for Pattinson.
In an interview with BuzzFeed this week in Beverly Hills, Pattinson discussed The Rover (which premiered at Cannes last month and comes out in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, and will be released nationally next Friday), and his post-Twilight career. And he has been working a lot: In addition to David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, which also premiered at Cannes, he will soon appear in Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert, Anton Corbijn’s Life, and Olivier Assayas’ Idol’s Eye with Robert De Niro, which has not yet begun filming. As someone who tripped into huge stardom after he was cast in Twilight, and then fell into a viper’s nest of paparazzi as one-half of a tabloid couple while he dated his co-star Kristen Stewart, Pattinson, now 28, described life after Edward as a “process.”
He has now lived a good portion of his life hunted, both by paps and fans, but in person, he is neither brooding nor tortured. Actually, he was quick to laugh. And he seems to have figured out how to live a sane life, if not a normal one.
You do a Southern accent for this movie, as well as a number of vocal and facial tics. Were those as written or did you develop them with David Michôd?Robert Pattinson: It said he was from the South, but not a specific place. I guess all those sorts of tics and things — it was just quite jerkily written? So when you start saying it out loud, it just ends up coming out in your body.
The Rover seems like it was grueling to make. It looks hot, and there are all those flies. Was it? And was that helpful for the role?RP: I thought it was really easy. I think the most stressful thing in movies is when the weather is really random. Then everyone is just panicking all the time. But it was just sort of hot all the time. If you were trying to play someone who was clean, then it would be incredibly stressful. To have someone coming in and touching up your makeup every 10 seconds — but you were just sitting in a pile of mud, it doesn’t really make a difference. You could just play in the dirt.
You were wearing the same thing the entire time.RP: I don’t even think they had doubles of the clothes. It took a long time. We went through hundreds of pairs of jeans. It was mainly about the feel — the way the costume department distressed them. We literally put glue in it to make them sit a certain way. They were, like, thick. But I just kind of knew how I wanted to feel. Also, the T-shirt, I knew from the audition exactly what T-shirt I wanted to wear. The colors and everything.
I want to ask about the scene when you sing along with “Pretty Girl Rock.” It’s out of nowhere, and lovely.RP: When I got to that part in the script, that was one of the main turning points: Wow, this is completely on another level to most things I’m reading. And so brave as well — doing something that could be completely baffling to people. I thought it was going to be a tiny insert, and when I walked in to do the scene, David’s got this massive push-in on a track that’s like a 100-foot-long track. And just pushing in for almost the entire song. It was kind of great.
It was a sweet moment — you really feel for the character who’s never lived a different kind of life.RP: He’s never really learned how to think like a normal person. He has no concept of what his decisions will affect, because no decision he’s ever made has ever affected anything before.
Twilight made you a rich movie star and paparazzi target. Now that it’s been almost two years since Breaking Dawn Part 2 came out, how do you look back on the experience?RP: I knew when I signed up after the first one came out, I knew it was going to be about a 10-year process to really — I’m not sure what! To get to the next plateau. I’ve been extremely lucky as well, but it kind of does seem like there’s little gradations — every year, every job, something happens, and people’s perception changes a little bit. I don’t look back on it being a different part of my life. It’s all one road, really.
A lot of are actors go back and forth between big studio movies and smaller indies. But since Twilight, you seem like you’ve avoided studio films. Is that deliberate?RP: It hasn’t really come up. Maybe there was a little period after the first Twilight where just because you’re the new thing, you get offered a bunch of big budget things. And nothing really connected with me. But I think my energy and also how people perceive me — I don’t fit too many roles like that. I never played team sports in school, and I think people can tell! As I get older, the parts become a little bit more open. But the young guy parts in big budget movies, you can always tell the guy has played team sports. I hated them.
I was going to ask you whether you feel Twilight has held you back, but now I think I should ask whether or not playing team sports has.RP: It’s just weird. I think I just gravitate toward loner parts. I feel my emotional reactions to things are quite off a little bit. I remember doing Twilight and Catherine Hardwicke just being, like, “Why are you looking at her like that? You look like you want to kill her.” I’m, like, “I do? That’s, like, a love look!” I try to do things with Cosmopolis and this — it’s an emotional spectrum that’s slightly off. I feel like I can commit to that a little bit more than hit the traditional beats.
You seem very director-focused in your choices.RP: You try and limit the margin for error as much as you can. Even if you end up doing a shitty movie, but you’ve been working with Herzog or something, you’re not doing a superhero movie that’s supposed to be something completely different. And then if you make a shitty superhero movie, it’s like, what do you expect?
Did you just say that the Werner Herzog movie you’re in, playing T.E. Lawrence, is shitty?RP: No, not at all! I’m hardly in it anyway.
Oh, is that right? I couldn’t tell.RP: I was only there for like 10 days. No, I think it’s going to be cool. I saw some of the stuff with Franco and Nicole Kidman that looked really good. It’s insurance. With Michôd, I wanted to work with him for ages. I thought Animal Kingdom was one of the best debuts in the last 10 years.
You have a bunch of movies coming up, but one that jumped out at me was Life, the story of James Dean and Dennis Stock, the photographer. A lot of the parts you’ve taken since Twilight seem to have nothing to do with your life experience — but the idea of photography and a young star does intersect.RP: It’s funny, I didn’t think about that. What I liked about it was that it was about professional jealousy. It was before James Dean was famous, but obviously he loved having his photo taken. Both of them were super arrogant, and they both think they’re the artist. Dennis was so filled with neuroses and jealous of everything. I didn’t really think about the celebrity aspect of it. I don’t think Dennis ever thought about it. Also, I think afterward, he was pissed that that was his legacy.
I read an interview with you recently in which you said you weren’t sure whether you’ve found your feet yet as an actor. Do you think you ever will?RP: I don’t know. In some ways, hopefully not. The only thing I deal with every single job is trying to overcome confidence issues. I think in some ways, it’s helped me just having fallen into it, and not really being, like, I need this. That’s when you go crazy and you lose control of your personal life. In some ways, it is very frustrating when I’ll know how to do something in my head, and something inhibits it. It just drives me nuts. I think it’s good when there’s no expectations of the character. And then I’m fine.
What do you do when you find you can’t do something?RP: It’s just, like, horrible. There was one moment when I was doing Life. I knew exactly how to do this scene. I’d been planning the whole scene for the whole movie. And it just, for whatever reason, it was just not happening. And no one else knows. I’m just, like, losing my mind on the set. Everyone’s so uncomfortable. Also, with a little bit of experience you realize, OK, I’m just going to not let anyone else speak, and deliver each line in about 10 different ways. And hopefully they’ll fix it in the edit! Can you just make my performance for me?
Is it frustrating?RP: It’s the most horrible thing ever. Especially because most of the time, especially in big emotional scenes, it’s just because you feel like you’re faking it. And you know how not to fake it, but it’s not happening in your body. And there’s nothing you can do. At the end of the day, people watching it half the time can’t tell at all. Or 90% of the time, you can watch a scene you think is the worst scene ever and you’re completely faking it — and no one knows.
I recently reread that Vanity Fair cover story about you from 2011 during which your life seemed pretty unlivable because of the paparazzi. Have things improved at all?RP: I remember doing that interview, and I thought I was, like, telling jokes. Then the interview comes out and it sounds like I’m about to kill myself.
Oh! Part of it was her commenting on what she observed about what your life was like.RP: I was, like, How have you observed this? We just sat in someone’s house. Whatever. I guess from an outside perspective, there’s a period of contraction in your life where you have to get used to what feels like your life becoming impossibly smaller. But that was about four years ago. I felt a little funny then. But you realize what you like doing, and suddenly it becomes easier. Some people get OK getting photographed doing their groceries or going out of whatever. I realized I cannot handle that at all. And so, I just don’t go to places where I get photographed. And as soon as I made that decision — don’t worry about it, stop complaining about it — it was a massive weight taken off.
So, there are ways to live your life not being photographed?RP: Yeah. 100%.
Even here in L.A.?RP: There are a very limited amount of places you can go. If you go to The Grove, you’ve got to accept something is going to happen.
You can’t go to the Apple Store at The Grove.RP: I miss that place. Watching the fountains!
So, you like living in Los Angeles? I mean, you could live wherever you want.RP: I always thought I was going to move back to London, but London’s changed so much since I left. A lot of my friends have left and stuff, or they have families. It’s different. Also, my main interest in my life at the moment is film, and this is the best place to be for film. Also, I like the kind of levity of living here as well. People want to get stuff done — they’re not downers all the time. In a lot of big cities, most people are just, like, Oh, god, it’s impossible. People aren’t like that in L.A. And I really like it.
In that Vanity Fair interview, you said you admired Charlie Sheen —RP: I did?
I’m sure it was very of the moment! You said you liked that he was a crazy person who doesn’t give a fuck. And in The Hollywood Reporter recently, you talked about being a fan of Harmony Korine’s for what I imagine are the same reasons. Could you not give a fuck if you tried?RP: I do, in a way. But I don’t want people to hate me. I basically do whatever I want. But one of the aspects of what I want is, I want people to like me!
When making his new film, The Rover, director David Michod may have uncovered the only location on Earth where Robert Pattinson is not followed by a hoard of paparazzi. The poetically sparse film, out nationwide this Friday, takes place in a desolate world 10 years in the future after the collapse of society, and reveals what could happen if humans are forced to survive by any means necessary. To create that world, Michod took Pattinson and his co-star Guy Pearce to the Flinders Ranges in the Australian desert, an area several hours north of Adelaide with few roads and fewer people. The cast and crew spent eight weeks shooting in early 2013, moving around to various locations throughout the desert, including the town of Marree, which has a population of 90.
“I didn’t quite realize how remote a lot of it was going to be,” Pattinson tells TIME. “It’s quite a big paparazzi culture in Australia. So I was expecting more of that. I remember setting up the contract and really thinking ‘If we’re going to be shooting exteriors all the time there’s going to be tons of people around. It’s going to be awful. I’m going to be playing this part and everyone’s going to think I’m weird.’”
“For Rob to shoot in a city like here or London you’re going to have a hundred people following the film set around,” Pearce adds. “Imagine if that’s how your work environment was all the time. So it’s not surprising that Rob thought it was going to be awful. But it wasn’t like that. There was like one person and the crew stopped them. I pity that one photographer that managed to find where we were.”
It was a hot, dusty environment that lent itself to the film’s bleak narrative, which follows a weathered man named Eric (Pearce) who encounters a simpleminded young man named Rey (Pattinson) and uses him to find his stolen car. It’s a minimal premise that showcases the grittiness of this future world, packing a subtle but hefty punch at the end. For the actors, the landscape helped channel the visceral survivalist nature of the story. “You know you’re going to be out there when you read the script and you’re aware of that being an aspect of the whole piece,” Pearce notes. “You almost can hear your own heart beating and you can hear yourself breathing. That feeling of possibly left out there alone is really palpable.”
The production moved from small town to small town over the eight weeks. Pearce, who drove himself the long distances, scored a crack in his car windshield that grew each leg of the journey. Pattinson, who says he was not allowed to drive himself, found the nomadic process fascinating and unlike any of his previous filming experiences. “The driving was incredible because there’s one road,” Pattinson says. “There’s so much wildlife [that has] not quite figured out that there’s a road. Literally every day someone would hit a kangaroo. There was blood all over the cars. It was crazy.”
Michod, who wrote the initial story for The Rover with actor Joel Edgerton back in 2008, selected this as his follow-up to 2010’s Animal Kingdom, his debut feature, largely because it embraced this elemental sense of survival in a hostile place. There is little explanation of what has happened that caused society to crumble in the story, but Michod’s underlying idea feels realistically possible.
“There wasn’t one single, sudden, almost unimaginable event that destroyed everything,” the director explains. “There was just a breakdown that was, in all likelihood, caused by a Western economic collapse probably running in tandem with the effects of extreme environmental degradation. Possibly the kinds of wars that might come as a consequence of peoples and countries fighting over limited resources. My hope is that you would just generally get the sense that things have just broken apart as opposed to exploded.”
Pearce and Pattinson’s characters are our window into this broken world, one with a brutal, animalistic instinct and the other with no real method of self-preservation. Pattinson embodies Rey as a twitchy, awkward migrant worker with a deep Southern accent. Michod sees the character as “not fully comfortable his own skin” and was impressed with Pattinson’s immersion into a role that is so different than his prior work, particularly in the Twilight series.
“I didn’t have any concerns,” Michod says of casting an actor as recognizable as Pattinson. “I don’t think I really had any idea how that baggage might manifest in terms of the film is received. And if anything I really liked the idea of taking someone so recognizable and giving them something wildly different to do. I found it kind of exhilarating watching him demonstrate that he’s actually a really wonderful actor.”
“I had quite an obscure, kind of obtuse, backstory for him,” Pattinson says of Rey. “Part of the whole thing with Rey is that his brother has played all the positions in his life. He doesn’t even really have memories – maybe there are memories of a place but it’s not like he had to put any particular effort in as he was growing up. Everything is blended together. It’s like being an actor – you can’t remember anything.”
The film takes on a meditative literary quality, falling somewhere between The Road and Of Mice and Men, which makes its moments of violence even more jarring. The Rover is the first film where Pattinson has really had to use a gun and he was not entranced by the opportunity. “I’m quite anti-gun, especially for idiots like me,” Pattinson says. “I didn’t like it at all. I don’t like the feeling of it. I get the thrill and the power trip of it but I felt silly as well holding a gun, especially pointing at targets and stuff. It’s just this bang-making machine. After a while it loses its luster.”
“I, too, have a real issue with guns,” Pearce adds. “I think they should be banished off the face of the earth. They’re awful things. There is an incredible thrill and sort of power as soon as you have one in your hands. That understanding of what you’re capable of doing with this thing is off the charts. It’s ridiculous and it’s enticing and it’s awful all at the same time and it just astounds me that so many people own guns in the world.”
Seeing as this possible incarnation of the future involves a lot of weaponry and the ability to commit violent acts, would either actor survive a similar collapse? “I think I’d end up in the opium den flophouse,” Pattinson says, referencing a depressed drug den seen briefly in the film. “Just hanging out like ‘I’m good.’” Pearce agrees, “Yeah, I’d probably end up there as well.”
Young-adult blockbusters deal in uncomplicated emotions that make them a poor actors’ showcase. Robert Pattinson’s career-launching five-year tour on the “Twilight” series gave him worldwide stardom and wealth, but not the thing he wanted most: respectability.
Even before the “Twilight” series concluded, Pattinson was stretching his range in smaller films. He played the 18-year-old but fully eccentric Salvador Dali in the Spanish-British gay love drama “Little Ashes,” and a scandal-mongering Parisian journalist in “Bel Ami.” He also took romantic leading roles in Hollywood’s “Remember Me” and “Water for Elephants,” but his mind was on more ambitious fare.
Which is why he’s starring as a grubby, violent, mental defective in the Australian suspense thriller “The Rover.” It’s an in-your-face change of pace that puts the British-born actor alongside the intense Guy Pearce. The pair play reluctant allies chasing cutthroats across the desolate Outback. Pattinson has won the best reviews of his career as a fidgeting misfit with a stuttering Florida twang.
The film was shot literally at the end of the road, he explained in a recent phone conversation. “It was where the tarmac ended. Then it was dirt road for another 2,000 miles to the other end of Australia.” The main location, a squalid village, has a population of “40 or 50, in the middle of nowhere.”
Though the conditions were rough, “there’s something really fun about having everyone together,” he said. “There’s a holiday element of it, as well. I enjoyed it.” But it wasn’t the stripped-down production that appealed as much as the lightly written role, offering wide latitude for a performer to make it his own. The screenplay is by director David Michôd and Joel Edgerton, both of whom are also actors.
“There’s something so special in the dialogue,” so terse it makes David Mamet sound gabby. “There’s just these two dialogue scenes that reveal things in an obtuse way about the character in the midst of these massive silences. I knew I’d have to bring tons to the table.”
“I thought it was funny when I first read it,” Pattinson said. Still, his audition meeting with the filmmakers was an endurance test. “I’m not the kind of actor who can just walk in and hang it out immediately. There’s just like a whole bunch of different neuroses I have to deal with first,” he said with a laugh. “The audition was like four hours long. The first 30 minutes I was in total panic mode, not able to really do anything. As soon as we got through that initial barrier, it was a lot easier. David definitely understands that.”
Pattinson had lots of leeway in creating his character’s stumbling speech patterns and desert derelict look. His hair is buzzed short and cropped high in the back, revealing a length of neck that looks vulnerable and ax-ready. “I liked the idea of seeing that bone at the bottom of your skull,” he said. I realized that when you’ve just got a fuzzy hairball, like a Q-Tip head, and you’re doing an over-the-shoulder shot, you can see the tendons in the back of your neck and stuff. You can still kind of do things, even when the camera’s not on your face. You’re still part of the scene.”
Alongside “The Rover’s” premiere at Cannes, Pattinson also presented his second collaboration with David Cronenberg, the blistering film-industry satire “Maps to the Stars.” If that nose-thumbing bruises any egos in the movie establishment, it won’t slow Pattinson’s indie-oriented momentum a bit. He has projects lined up with Harmony Korine (“Spring Breakers”), James Gray (“The Immigrant”) and Werner Herzog, whose “Rescue Dawn” gave Christian Bale a change of pace from his run as Batman.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento